Arts & Culture
From a congressionally designated national WWI memorial to the world's only museum dedicated to Negro Leagues baseball, the Kansas City metro holds cultural institutions with a documented first or only behind them, not just local favorites.
American Jazz Museum
Housed in the historic 18th & Vine Jazz District, the American Jazz Museum is an official Smithsonian Affiliate, a formal designation granted to only a small number of institutions nationwide. Its collection includes Charlie Parker's own alto saxophone, and the museum shares its building with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, making the block one of the few places in the country where both stories are told under one roof.
Arabia Steamboat Museum
The museum displays what is billed as the largest single collection of pre-Civil War artifacts in the world: roughly 200 tons of cargo recovered from the steamboat Arabia, which sank in the Missouri River in 1856 and lay buried until a 1988 excavation. The haul includes more than 4,000 boots and shoes and 235 ax heads, preserved in near-original condition by the anaerobic mud that entombed them. US News & World Report ranked it the #1 thing to do in Kansas City.
National Museum of Toys and Miniatures
Located on the UMKC campus, this museum holds the world's largest collection of fine-scale miniatures on public display, alongside one of the nation's largest antique toy collections, more than 100,000 objects across 33,000 square feet. It grew from the 1982 merger of two private collections and remains one of only a handful of museums anywhere built around that combination.
National WWI Museum and Memorial
Congress designated this Kansas City institution the country's official museum dedicated to World War I in 2004, then added the official national memorial designation in 2014 as part of the war's centennial. It is the only site in the United States to carry both titles, housing one of the most comprehensive WWI artifact collections in the world beneath the 1926 Liberty Memorial tower.
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
Founded in 1990 in the historic 18th & Vine District, the NLBM describes itself as the world's only national museum dedicated to preserving the history of Negro Leagues baseball. In July 2006, the U.S. Congress formally recognized it as America's National Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and it sits two blocks from where the Negro National League itself was founded in 1920.
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Free every day, the Nelson-Atkins holds the largest collection of monumental bronzes by Henry Moore in the United States and one of the country's strongest collections of Chinese art, assembled largely by curator Laurence Sickman in the early 20th century. In 2007, Time magazine ranked the museum's Bloch Building the #1 architectural marvel in its worldwide roundup of new and upcoming buildings.